Tunnelling borders

The growing ubiquity of militarized borders has with it produced a subterranean network of cross-border tunnels. In tunnelling, global “urban burrowers” have begun to compose a new layer of multitude grounded in
the struggles against global hegemony itself.

National borders
are typically viewed as lines drawn with barbed wire, or fixed by concrete and
steel. Politicians laud 'walls' as effective solutions to tides of foreign
invaders aiming to steal jobs, terrorize populations, and dilute national
identities. Beyond the ‘security theater’, walls are an architectural fallacy
propped up by popular pretense and political fantasy, gross
contractor profiteering, legal exception,
institutional
racism, and often brute colonization.

More recently, they have served as key infrastructure
for a post-9/11 techno-militaristic opportunism, an internationalization of border
security, and as a mock-hydrological system of surplus labor exploitation
and incarceration. They also disguise a sub-political landscape of interlacing
activities that operate through the wall in various shadowy vectors, many of
which—due to increased migration criminalization, aerial surveillance, trade
blockades, foreign occupation, and chronic bi-national corruption—have been
forced to coalesce underground, driven further into both peril and
“illegality.” But walls don't merely sort or displace cross-border flows,
rather they trigger informal tunneling as a way to compile unauthorized
movements into a universal bottom class of extreme suspect. By forcing
globalization's “antagonists” to retreat underground it becomes a lot easier to
treat their cause as its own kind of act of guerilla war, which only
precipitates a legal rationale for warfare in retaliation.

It’s no surprise
then that parts of the US-Mexico border already look like the West Bank, while
Kashmir conjures images of the Korean DMZ; or that Rio and Gaza have gradually
come to reflect one another. Neither is it
surprising that India, like Israel, is completely walling itself off from its
Muslim neighbors, while most of the Arab world evolves as a region cleaved by
military fence construction. Turkey’s proximity as a gateway from the Middle
East to Europe, and more critically as Syria’s neighbor, has instigated a spate
of border projects along its eastern edge as well as with Greece
and Bulgaria.
With the hardest stop gaps already in place like the US-Mexico fence, Israel’s
dangerous barrier with Egypt, the Spanish fence installation in Ceuta and
Melilla on Morocco’s coast, or the entire Mediterranean Sea and patrolled
coastal waters surrounding the Caribbean and Australia for that matter, new
walls continue to spawn from South
Mexico and Myanmar
to Russia’s borders with Georgia.

If current trends
continue, even the lesser barricades are destined to become full blown
militarized border zones before they fall. With global migration soaring at the
thrusts of perpetual war, climate catastrophe and ‘disaster capitalism’,
deepening civil conflicts, and the ever-polarizing effects of trans-global
capitalism on systemic inequality, national borders are being reinscribed as
part and parcel of a more universal carceral frontier composed of precarious
settlements, refugee
camps and detentioncenters.
The more border zones urbanize, the greater the current model of securitization
will unite them with all its usual subterfuge.

Yet just as every
wall casts a shadow, so too does each inspire its own mechanism of
subversion. Each wall invariably serves
as the instrument of its own undoing, its own intrinsic failure. Migrants,
refugees, smugglers, coyotes, cartels, militants, militaries themselves, and
various ‘others’ set in to motion have never failed to devise ingenious ways to
pass unseen. The wall is an object that inadvertently designs its own negation
in this way. It is a surface ultimately defined by the pressures exerted upon
it, destined not to stand as a monument to efficacy but to its own delusional
failure.

Geographer Michael
Dear (2013) states,
“Partition is the crudest tool in the armory of geopolitics, an overt
confession of failed diplomacy.” Where there have been walls there too have
often been tunnels. ‘The tunnel’ is the crude by-product of 'the wall' itself,
a spatial sibling inseparably and geopolitically locked in a broken embrace.
Tunnels and subterranean habitats have a long fascinating history dating back
to the dawn of human kind. Military tunnels, mining and
trench warfare have their own ongoing epic archeological narratives to
tell. But so does the emerging micro-niche of cross-border tunnels whose
excavation cannot be delinked from the history of the nation-state and the wall
itself. Most have sprung up from smuggling or as a means of escape.

It remains
somewhat of a myth, but the first border tunnels along the US’s southern
boundary were allegedly said to have existed during the Prohibition era. The
US, as Peter Andreas chronicles in his latest book,
was largely built by smugglers. It’s also well known that both the CIA and
Eastern German citizens constructed separate tunnels of their own for espionage
and escape prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall, contexts that hardly seem
questioned today. During the siege of Sarajevo in the early nineties the
Bosnian Army constructed a secret tunnel linking the city with the Bosnian
controlled territory below Sarajevo’s airport. It was used to smuggle in aid,
supplies and weapons while also escorting people out. In 2005, a tunnel was
discovered under the border between British Columbia and Washington apparently
designed to smuggle marijuana. There are numerous other past examples, but the
trend has hardly slowed, nor should we expect it to.

Not only has
history shown the ‘underground’ to be a vital space of transgression where the
limits of (super)power have been contested and circumnavigated, but ‘the
tunnel’ as a spatial political paradigm has proven humanity’s greater will to
engineer triumph over unlawful barriers time and time again. Vietnam’s Củ
Chi tunnels being perhaps the greatest example in recent history. Or, even the
Al Qaeda and Taliban caves in Afghanistan. It only makes sense that with
increased walls and a globalized surveillance state comes a new contingency of
tunnelers and communities persisting underground.

These groups, while not
directly linked, represent the vertical spatial practice of geography that Eyal Weizman first
outlined on openDemocracy with his essay “The
Politics of Verticality” (2002). Stephen
Graham continues to explore this at a larger geopolitical scale and stresses the necessity “to
link the proliferation of tunnel complexes with the extraordinary intensification of state-backed technoscientific scrutiny that has marked
vertical geopolitics over the past few decades.” (2012). I would contend these
“urban burrowers” have begun to compose a new layer of multitude grounded in
the struggles against global hegemony itself.

On October 7th
this year, the Israeli Defense Forces uncovered a 1,700 meter long cross-border
tunnel
stretching from the periphery of Gaza to the outskirts of a Kibbutz. Hamas claimed
its intentions were to capture Israeli soldiers while preparing for Israel’s
next round of hostilities. With Pentagon developed tunnel-detection technology,
Israel and Egypt have destroyed much of Gaza’s highly sophisticated and
nationally sanctioned tunnel
network, rumored once to number over a thousand. They serve as both Gaza’s
economic lifelines for obtaining goods via Egypt, and as Hamas’ controlled
passages for arms movement and subterranean warfare. Essentially, the Israeli
blockade of Gaza’s borders has left the Palestinians with no other means but to
nationalize their tunnel infrastructure for basic trade. It's estimated the
ongoing destruction of these tunnels is costing Gaza millions.

By forcing the Palestinians to tunnel Israel has turned the bulk of their
economy into a military target, since the economic tunnels cannot be accurately
distinguished from Hamas’ militarized tunnels. The blockade is an insidious way
for Israel to force Gaza to dig so the tunnels' ambiguity can then be leveraged
as a case being treated as legally-contentious
“dual-use” targets. dubiously
legitimating Israel’s perpetual campaign of urbicide
against Palestinian statehood.

Ever since the
Second Lebanon War in 2006, Israel has maintained extreme border vigilance
after discovering an extensive network of “underground villages” connected with
more complex Hezbollah bunkers, prompting the IDF to prepare in mock tunnels
for a future “tunnel war.” Reports
from a Lebanese newspaper last year claimed that Hezbollah controls an even
more secretive series of tunnels and bunkers extending into Syrian territory.

Just a few weeks
ago on October 30th, US federal agents shut down a narco
“super tunnel” stretching 1/3 of a mile across the US-Mexico border joining
warehouses in San Diego and Tijuana. It was one of the most elaborate of the
roughly 140 tunnels that have been discovered along the border over the last
twenty years, complete with its own electric rail cart system, ventilation, and
concrete foundation. In Nogales, Arizona, migrants and drug smugglers alike
have been known to use tunnels and the massive floodwater drainage canals
straddling the border as a means of movement. And since the Border Patrol
beefed up its own roboticized subterranean policing additional makeshift
tunnels have been found hacking into the existing sewage conduits. If North
America has a border tunnel capital, Nogales is it.

In 2007 and 2008,
security crackdowns prior to the Summer Olympic Games in Beijing exposed three
separate underground trade operations that deployed secret tunnels,
cross-border tubing and pulley systems, and urban drainage ducts to ferry cheap
electronic goods from Hong Kong to mainland China where they’re far more
expensive. And about this time in November of last year, a 50-meter cocaine
smuggling tunnel was found linking a Brazilian dealer’s house in the São Remo
favela to an area outside the University of São Paulo through a wall separating
the two. Student demand for cocaine prompted the tunnel apparently
because many were too afraid of venturing into the favela.

This constant
specter of walls cropping up along the world’s boundaries at first seems
ignorant of its own porosity. Yet, the policy of walling hardly overlooks these
routine practices of less visible trespass. In a so-called ‘borderless’ era of
free trade walls strategically redirect unsanctioned cross-border flows further
out of view and deeper underground by beckoning their own subversion this way,
and for multiple reasons:

[1] Walls help to force a commingling of
uncontrollable movements of various types with the illicit underground networks
of criminal drug and human trafficking syndicates, and militant groups;

[2] by
driving the world’s labor/refugee overflow underground it becomes easier to
perceive such a superfluous population as less human and through a wider lens
of “ferality” (a description
Pentagon researchers have drawn upon to characterize the insurgents fighting
the new urban wars of the 21st century—wars that would take place in the filthy
spatial fallout of failed states/cities). This paves the creation of a more
broad base subclass of borderzone criminality identified through a purposeful
blurring of migrant/refugee/criminal/terrorist suspect categories. This
pixelation only invites a greater juridical stripping of their legal status and
harsh penalization under anti-terror national security frameworks; and,

[3]
underground spaces can be deemed more viable military targets despite those
that lack any violent intention by virtue of sharing a spatial typology that in
nature coincides with other like-spaces that have been designed for more
nefarious uses.

Today, not only do
walls beget tunnels they co-construct them as an intended by-product that
forces a multitude of forbidden cross-border sub-agencies into self dug graves
and abyssal legality. Rather than taking responsibility through progressive
immigration and labor policy, or re-examining the failures of the War On Drugs,
or preventing Israel's annihilation of Palestinian statehood, national
governments deploy a dehumanizing strategy of criminalization through forced
tunnelization.

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